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Summary

Blends memoir and scholarship to provide a moving and sometimes unsettling look at how academic discourse affects the cultural values and identities that students bring into the writing classroom.

Identity Matters explores the question that consistently plagues composition teachers: why do their pedagogies so often fail? Donna LeCourt suggests that the answer may lie with the very identities, values, and modes of expression higher education cultivates. In a book that does precisely what it theorizes, LeCourt analyzes student-written literacy autobiographies to examine how students interact with and challenge cultural theories of identity. This analysis demonstrates that writing instruction does, indeed, matter and has a significant influence on how students imagine their potential in both academic and cultural realms. LeCourt paints not only a compelling and vexing picture of how students interact with academic discourse as both mind and body, but also offers hope for a reconceived pedagogy of social-material writing practice.

"Compositionists will learn a great deal from LeCourt and her students' literacy autobiographies. This is a powerful study, informed by the voice of one who has been there."  Maureen M. Hourigan, author of Literacy as Social Exchange: Intersections of Class, Gender, and Culture

"I have found myself thinking in a more sustained and creative way about the processes of language formation, development, and reconfiguration after reading this work."  Kathleen Marie Dixon, Bowling Green State University

Donna LeCourt is Associate Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Material Conditions of Identity Politics, or How Identity Matters in Public and Academic Discourses

Interchapter 1: Home Places

2. Academic Discourse and Subject Production: Toward a Technology of Power